So Covid covered our faces (like slaves)

Power needs to destroy social relations, to create lonely,
perfectly manipulable individuals. It even legitimized having to hide
his face with a mask. However, how do you have a relationship with the
other without seeing him in the face? The human face is the part of the
body that must always be naked and that must not be hidden. It is no
coincidence that in ancient Greece the slave was defined as faceless,
therefore without dignity.

During an afternoon walk under the arcades of the center, a friend
greeted me but I didn’t recognize him. The mask he wore had prevented me
from identifying his features. Only after he contravened the strict
anti-Covid rules, that is, after having lowered the “muzzle”, I was able
to understand who he was and return the greeting. A trivial episode,
which will have happened to who know how many Italians in these times of
pandemic. Yet that little incident made me reflect on the importance of
the human face. A relationship is impossible without the recognition of
the other’s face.

I remembered reading somewhere that every human being as soon as he
opens his eyes to life looks for a face: that of his mother. A research
that continues throughout existence and which represents the soul of the
same communication and relationship with others. We discover that we
are men when we can look to a face and say “you”. In fact, the newborn
looks for the face of the mother, as the child looks for the face of the
parents, the lover looks for the face of the beloved, the disciple
looks for the face of the teacher, the man looks for the face of God.

The drama of today’s liquid and postmodern society lies in the fact
that today’s man is unable to consciously say “you” to anyone. Precisely
in this drama lies and hides the obsessive and violent search for power
that largely characterizes the usual relationships between people,
based mostly on the systematic reduction of the other to a design of
possession and use.

It is a cultural model that has long been imposed by power and fed
through its deadly propaganda machine. Just watch any prime-time
television drama, or read the entertainment magazines.

Power needs to destroy social relations, to create individuals who
are lonely, isolated, possibly single, without roots, without identity,
fragile, defenseless and fearful, that is, perfectly manipulable
subjects.

From this point of view, the Covid-19 pandemic is an unexpected (or
willed?) Manna from heaven. It even legitimized having to hide the face
with a mask. But how do you have a relationship with the other without
seeing him in the face? The human face is the part of the body that must
always be naked and that must not be hidden.

It is no coincidence that in ancient Greece, the slave was defined as ἀπρόσωπος
(apròsopos), that is without (a-) face (pròsopos), therefore without
dignity, without freedom, a mere “res” [latin for “thing”], an object in
the hands of the master. The uncovered face is a sign of freedom. Even
the lepers removed from the community were faceless.

The face is also what distinguishes man from the animal, as the great Cicero taught us in his work De Legibus
(I, 27): “(…) is qui appellatur vultus, qui null in animante esse
praeter hominem potest, indicat mores” (what is called a face, which
cannot exist in any living being except in man, indicates the character
of a person).

The face is an essential element of the human relationship. Even
God to make himself known by men had to make his face glimpse by
becoming man, that is, by entering History as a person. It is revealed
through the face of Jesus Christ, who has become the face of human
destiny, the nature of the meaning of our being, precisely because Jesus
Christ is the face of the Father.

Thus, the total definition of the meaning of man in the world has passed through a face.

I also remembered that the Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
devoted much of his philosophical research to the meaning of the face.
For the Lithuanian thinker, the epiphany and therefore the manifestation
of the other, takes place in dialogue, in the “face to face”. The other
then becomes a revelation granted in particular by the face, which is
the primary means of communication and the instrument through which the
humanity of each one is revealed, to the point of allowing a glimpse of a
trace of the Infinite. The face is the place where, more than anywhere
else, man’s dynamics are played out, and therefore also his relationship
with Power. For this reason – as Giorgio Agamben, another philosopher whom I respect, has clearly written – the face is also “the place of politics”.

The state of exception in which humanity has fallen following the
Covid-19 pandemic has gone so far as to consider the concealment of the
face as normal, even the need to prevent the epiphany of the other as a
duty. Agamben also warns, however, that “a country that decides to
renounce its own face, to cover the faces of its citizens with masks
everywhere is, then, a country that has erased every political dimension
from itself”. And “in this empty space, subjected at every moment to
limitless control, individuals isolated from each other are now moving,
who have lost the immediate and sensitive foundation of their community
and can only exchange messages directed to a name without a face”.

Never as in these times where the law appears to be conditioned by the health emergency, in which Carl Schmitt’s Ausnahmezustand
(State of Exception) risks becoming a normal paradigm of government,
the face is truly the place of politics. It is the challenge to the
tyranny that a people of “apròsopos” [faceless] claims, made up of faceless individuals, without dignity, without identity, without freedom.

Once again Agamben on this point is very clear: “Our unpolitical time
does not want to see its own face, it keeps it at a distance, masks it
and covers it. There must be no more faces, only numbers and digits.
Even the tyrant is faceless”. That’s it.